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 Brief exercise that’s intense enough to get your heart rate elevated
and make you breathe heavily activates molecular pathways in the
body that boost chemicals called catecholamines, such as
epinephrine, which suppressed the growth of breast cancer cells,
researchers from Denmark found.
“It is important to highlight that exercise training and epinephrine
did not completely prevent tumor formation, but induced a 50 percent
reduction,” senior study author Pernille Hojman from University of
Copenhagen told Reuters Health. “Thus, exercise training can never
replace anti-cancer therapy, but could be an effective supportive
strategy, which in addition to the biological effects, also has been
shown to increase the patients’ quality of life and sense of
empowerment.”
Plenty of population studies have shown that exercise can reduce a
woman’s risk of breast cancer and, in women who already have breast
cancer, may keep it from coming back. Few studies have examined how
this works.
Hojman’s team used experimental mice implanted with human breast
cancer tumors as well as tumor cells in test tubes to investigate
how serum samples collected from healthy women and breast cancer
patients before and after exercise affect the development of the
breast tumor cells, and what mechanisms were involved.
They found that serum samples taken after exercise reduced the
ability of tumor cells to grow in test tubes or in mice. Only 45
percent of mice with tumors steeped in post-exercise serum developed
tumors, compared with 90 percent of mice with tumors not exposed to
post-exercise serum or exposed to pre-exercise serum.
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The researchers traced this anti-tumor activity to a rise in
epinephrine and norepinephrine that occurs with moderately intense
exercise and its effect on the a gene-signaling pathway known as
Hippo that, among other things, helps to suppress tumor development.
This effect emerged only with serum samples taken after 15 minutes
of moderate- to high-intensity exercise, according to the report in
Cancer Research, and it was not related to the serum-donor’s body
weight, blood sugar levels or immune responses.
“In our study, we found that breast cancer patients in adjuvant
chemotherapy, were indeed capable of performing the required
exercise, so it is feasible for cancer patients to do the exercise
training we are proposing,” Hojman noted in an email interview.
“Our identified mechanism of an epinephrine-driven regulation of the
Hippo signaling pathway during exercise could certainly also be
envisioned to work in other types of cancer,” she said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2eWH9ne Cancer Research, online September 8,
2017.
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